Freeland paints Putin as villain of peace in G7 talks

debate had been decided in 1989 or 1991,” Freeland told a recent student gathering at the University of Toronto, part of the summit’s youth outreach efforts.

“But it’s not looking that way so much now. And I think that is very much an issue that is relevant and important for the G7 to take on.”

Freeland is drawing on the sweep of a generation’s worth of history, since the end of the Cold War to the current depths of Russian tensions with the West since it annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula four years ago.

A Ukrainian Canadian who also speaks several languages including Russian, Freeland described the formative influence of travelling to Russia as a freelance journalist in the early 1990s and witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union. It launched a journalism career that saw her report from Moscow and Kyiv.

“It’s part of what’s made me foreign minister,” she told the U of T student audience.

“Actually observing the collapse of the vastest communist regime in the world and then observing the effort to build something in its place has profoundly shaped my thinking, including about this new challenge of democracy versus authoritarianism.”

Freeland is now absorbing the shocks of the West’s biggest clash with Russia since the Cold War. Canada joined its allies in recently expelling a handful of Russian diplomats, after blaming the Kremlin for the nerve gas attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the British city of Salisbury.

Russia denies responsibility, but Freeland and others don’t believe it.

Trudeau has said the expulsion was also due to what he characterized as a Russian disinformation campaign targeting Freeland, something the government calls Kremlin meddling in Canadian democracy. Russia has also banned Freeland from travelling to the country because she criticized Putin in her reporting.

Freeland elaborated on her concerns with Russia during another event in Winnipeg earlier this month.

She said the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea not only constituted the most serious breach of Europe’s borders since the Second World War, but it has undermined global efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons.

Freeland said the nerveagent poisonings in Salisbury constitute a violation of the ban on chemical weapons use that has its roots in the First World War.

“One of the things we collectively agreed is that there would be some forms of weapons that were so devastating, so dangerous that we would actually have the maturity of a human civilization to declare them offlimits,” she said.